Rewilding row after National Trust ploughs over ‘irreplaceable’ waxcap fungi
Botanists said the work had destroyed a habitat that had taken decades to form
Environment Correspondent Olivia Rudgard – 20 April 2021
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/environment/2021/04/20/rewilding-row-national-trust-ploughs-irreplaceable-waxcap-fungi/
The grassland, now ploughed-over
The National Trust’s attempt to rewild a meadow in Cumbria has backfired after ploughing destroyed “irreplaceable” waxcap mushrooms.
Botanists accused the charity of “cowboy conservation” after the grassland near Cockermouth in the north west of the Lake District was ploughed over in an attempt to create a wildflower meadow.
Waxcaps are brightly-coloured mushrooms which grow on undisturbed ground, but they are increasingly under threat from intensive farming.
Rob Dixon, a botanist and conservation ecologist, who first noticed the incident and had spotted the fungi there in the autumn, said he had reported it to Natural England as a possible breach of regulations limiting changes to rural land. The government agency is investigating.
“There’s so much guidance out there about meadow restoration and grassland restoration, and this just flies in the face of all of it,” he said.
“The only term I can come up with that’s adequate is a sort of cowboy conservation. Obviously no clue about what they’re doing whatsoever.”
On Twitter the National Trust’s North Lakes ranger team defended the change, stating that the soil had “low nutrient value”.
“It is part of a planned work to create ~3 acres of hay meadow, providing a rich and varied habitat for hundreds of species,” the tweet said.
Waxcap mushrooms only grow on grasslands that have been left undisturbed for long periods, making them an indicator of ancient, nutrient-poor land that has not been used for farming.
Adding nutrients to soil in the form of fertiliser is often done by farmers looking to use it for crops, but nutrient-poor land is ecologically valuable because of the native plants and fungi it can support. Once ploughed away the fungi is unlikely to recover, experts said.
TWEET THE NATIONAL TRUST DELETED:
Thank you for sharing this with us. We’re working closely with the farmer at Shepherds Field on the Dunthwaite estate to manage the land in a sustainable, nature-friendly way. The area of land pictured which has been sub-soiled had low nutrient value
— NT North Lakes (@NTNorthLakes) April 20, 2021
Botanist Joshua Styles, founder of the North-West Rare Plant Initiative, said: “Waxcap grasslands take decades to establish. And grasslands that waxcaps grow in are really low-nutrient and unimproved.
“The National Trust has done away with this incredibly important habitat that’s taken decades and decades and decades to establish.”
As well as waxcaps, such grasslands can also be home to native plants such as sheep’s fescue, heath bedstraw, small cudweed and heath cudweed, now endangered in England.
An anonymous National Trust spokesman said: “We are aware of concerns over a field that has been ploughed near Bassenthwaite Lake, Cumbria, and we are currently looking into how this may have happened.
“The National Trust is committed to nature friendly farming and work alongside tenants to tackle the biodiversity crisis while ensuring land delivers for nature and farmers.”
A Natural England spokesperson, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “We are aware of reports and are investigating possible damage to semi-natural grassland near the River Derwent.
“We are unable to comment further at this stage.”
The National Trust was the target of a backlash on social media for turning over the soil in the field on its Dunthwaite estate, close to the Lakes Distillery between Bassenthwaite and Isel.
Farmer and author James Rebanks: ‘I hate the word rewilding – it’s been weaponised’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/06/james-rebanks-interview-farmer-author-defra/
Ahead of the publication of his third book, he talks about turning down Defra, his fears for UK farming and a life-changing trip to Norway
It has been a hectic few months for farmer and author James Rebanks, what with his family’s farm in the Lake District to tend, as well as a much-anticipated new book, the follow up to his prize-winning best-sellers The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral. To add to the pressure, over the summer he received an invitation from the new government asking him to sit on the board of directors of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the ministry responsible for the nation’s agriculture.
No wonder, then, that when we meet on his farm, tucked away in a vibrantly green Cumbrian valley in Gowbarrow Fell, 1,100 feet up in the hills between Keswick and Penrith, 50-year-old Rebanks is running rather than walking as he shows me its 500 acres where they keep Herdwick sheep and Galloway cows.
“I turned Defra down,” he says. “Mostly because of my fundamental problems with Defra about budget.”
For much of our time together, the straight-talking, personable Rebanks is all smiles and jokes. At school, he recalls, before he left at 16 with just two GCSEs, “I was rough round the edges, and only good at making people laugh.”
But when he talks about farm budgets he is deadly serious. It is a measure of just how deep he believes the crisis in farming to be.
With Brexit, the £2.4 billion in subsidies based on acreage paid to British farmers by the EU under the old Common Agricultural Policy are in the process of being replaced by Defra with a system that instead rewards good environmental stewardship. Rebanks wholeheartedly approves of the direction of travel, “but we haven’t delivered on the new deal and farmers can’t go on living on air”.
They are telling him, he reports, that because of delays, shelf-loads of bureaucracy and general “ineptitude”, the ministry is effectively standing by while their old-style subsidy payments are tapered off, without giving farmers access to the promised new funding for nature that is meant to replace them.
“Some farmers have lost as much as 38 per cent of their income. They can’t get on the new scheme unless they have a Natural England adviser prepared to treat them seriously enough to process their application and there aren’t enough advisers,” he says.
In such a chaotic situation, he has been one of the lucky ones. His money has come through, but overall he labels the transformation as a “tragedy”. “There are literally hundreds and thousands of farmers wanting to do amazing things for nature on their land who are being turned away,” he says.
To add insult to injury, in his eyes, Defra recently announced a £358 million underspend in the agricultural budget over the last three years. “That sounds to anyone not in farming as if farmers don’t want that money, aren’t trying to claim it. That is not at all what is happening.”
His refusal of the Defra offer is beginning to make more sense. In his own case he can point out around the farm how the new funds are being used: to put back hedgerows to reverse an alarming drop in bio-diversity in the countryside; to restore rivers to their old meandering courses to reduce the risk of flooding in towns and cities downstream; and to replant lost species like betony in his pastures that “do remarkable things for degraded soil”. But far too many farmers are not able to get on with the job that needs doing and which they want to do because of a logjam at the top.
That should matter to all of us, he insists. “Insufficient capacity in Defra means we are not buying enough of the nature that we need. We are miles away from doing what we need to do to mend rural Britain.”
It quickly becomes clear, as Rebanks races ahead, that he is as passionate about the acres he farms – he stands in a line of “dog-and-stick” Cumbrian Hill farmers stretching back 600 years – as he is about just how vital such family farms are. “We need more small farmers but at the moment we are losing them.”
Economics are driving them to the wall at the same time science is suggesting they are crucial to our collective future. “The best farming, the evidence shows, is quite human-intensive, less mechanical, less mono-cultural vast fields of one thing. Our diet and our landscape need much more of a patchwork.”
Rebanks grew up on his farm, working as soon as he could walk alongside his father and his grandfather (the heroes of his first two books). That has given him a profound respect for tradition that sits sometimes awkwardly alongside his belief that farming has to adapt to the crisis in nature and to climate change.
Many of the improvements he is making on the farm fit broadly under the banner of rewilding. “I don’t like the word rewilding and the permutations of it. If rewilding means, do we need more nature in our landscape, I absolutely own it.”
Other uses, though, annoy him. “My problem is the word is weaponised and then you have rewilders saying: ‘Your farm takes up too much room, James, that’s space we want for the wild.’ I get it, but I’m not going anywhere, and neither can I because I have to pay my bills.”
He continues: “What really bugs me about rewilding is when it simply becomes greenwashing. If you are a government not following through on your promises to transform 70 to 80 per cent of the countryside to make it better, you do some token rewilding bits here and there, flagship projects you can take people round.”
Farming can be a fraught business. “There are,” Rebanks reflects, trying to be more diplomatic, “people on both sides of this debate playing culture wars, and I am in the middle.” And, he adds, getting caught in the crossfire, because of the public profile his books and numerous public appearances have given him (which, of course, is why Defra wants him on board).
“I believe in compromise, but the current situation leads to grumpy farmers who no longer trust government or environmentalists, and a whole new breed of rabble rousers who know exactly how to play to their own tribe,” he says.
Rebanks is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s best-known farmer”, but surely that crown belongs to Jeremy Clarkson? “He is massively helpful,” Rebanks says, “whether you like him or not. I’m not a petrol head but he’s got people seeing how insane the economics of farming are. I’ve had more non-farmers approach me to talk about farming because of Clarkson’s Farm than anything else that has happened in the last 15 years.”
The sins Rebanks attributes to Defra happened under Conservative ministers. Does he think the incoming Labour team might do better?
He has just come back, he tells me, from attending a fringe meeting at this autumn’s Labour party conference. “I’ve never done anything like that before in my life. I’ve never been to anything political.” He is not even a member of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU).
Yet the farming minister, Daniel Zeichner, who has also been praised in these pages earlier this year by Tom Bradshaw, current president of the NFU, has visited the Rebanks’ farm not once but twice.
“He’s saying the right things. I’m absolutely confident he believes in a compromise between farming and nature, but I am not absolutely confident that he is going to in an argument with the Treasury on the right amount of money so we have the nature we need.”
If he doesn’t in Rachel Reeves’ forthcoming budget, what will be the consequence? “Instead of a gain of nature as has been planned, I think we are going to have a loss of nature. If you short change the spend, we all lose. It is very simple,” says Rebanks.
His passion for restoring nature is what took him to Norway for his new book, The Place of Tides, to a remote, uninhabited rocky island on the edge of the coastal shelf in the Vega archipelago, a Unesco World Heritage Site. He spent 10 weeks there working alongside two elderly women, Anna and Ingrid. Each spring they are single-handedly reviving a long-standing tradition of protecting nesting eider ducks, and harvesting their feathers once they leave their nests for duvets.
It feels like a bit of a departure from the very English setting and subject matter of his two previous books. “I went there,” he explains, “to get away from people, from history, to step out of all the stuff that worries me in the world.”
The trip also came four years after the death of his father, Tom, from cancer. Their relationship hadn’t always been easy, especially in his late teens when he left school and they were working side by side on the farm.
“At the time it was getting a bit desperate financially, he was getting a bit nasty, I was getting a bit uppity. There were some nasty fights.”
It was only in retrospect, he says, that he realised that taking himself off to a remote Norwegian island was a form of grieving. “In the years before I went there, I’d lost my dad, my aunties and all that older generation that anchored me, but on the island I found myself with people who were like them.”
He remembers shaking Anna’s hand for the first time. “I got a chill. Her hands felt like my grandmother’s hands, boney, sinewy, working-class hands. She was my people. She didn’t give a toss about my books.”
He makes it sound as though he had reached a crisis point in his life, yet inside his Cumbrian farmhouse, an old barn that he has been able to extend with the significant royalties from his books to better accommodate his growing family of four, Molly, Bea, Isaac and Tom, aged from seven to 18, the atmosphere is unmistakably one of warmth and love and life.
His two sons are just home from school, his mother-in-law is helping with the school-run, while Bea, who works on the farm and wants to follow in his footsteps, pops in and out. Missing is Rebanks’ wife, Helen, who in 2023 published her own book, The Farmer’s Wife, which followed her husband’s into the best-sellers’ charts.
Helen’s book, The Farmer’s Wife, has been adapted into a stage play Credit: Joanne Coates
Are they setting themselves up to become the real-life Phil and Jill Archer for the nation? He smiles. “I’ve only ever listened to The Archers for half an episode. That was enough”.
His wife is currently on a trip to London to see a stage dramatisation of her book. Will there be similar adaptations of his books? “I must have been asked about 20 times to be in a documentary about my life and I’ve turned them all down. I don’t like being recognised any more than I am.”
Helen came from another farming family and grew up close by. “She was the swotty, academic farmer’s daughter, determined to get out of the small town we had gone to school in. We met when I was 21 and she was 17.”
He credits her with awakening ambition in him after a misspent, “rough-round-the-edges” youth, encouraging him to go to night school to get his A-levels, and landing a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history.
“I didn’t like it,” he recalls of his university days. “I had a vague, chippy and I now realise completely pointless hatred of whoever ‘them’ was, as if everyone at Oxford was one thing and I had to beat them. I could have enjoyed it more.”
It didn’t stop him getting a double first. His initial plan had been to use Oxford as a stepping stone to get a job that would pay him enough to save the farm.
Instead, he returned after graduating to work on the farm, but it had given him the courage in his spare time to attempt to realise an ambition to write that he had developed while reading his way through the novels on his “obsessively bookish” mother’s shelves. It is a habit he still makes time to indulge in, having just finished the Booker Prize shortlist (Percival Everett’s James is his top tip).
The Place of Tides, marks quite a shift in his writing, more novel than memoir, realised in rhythmic, poetic language. But it is familiar territory, namely his struggle to balance the timeless with the timely, tradition with the changes that need to be made for a changing future.
He first caught a glimpse of Anna on a 2012 visit to Norway. To make ends meet he had taken on some consultancy work on sustainability for Unesco. “I got 40 minutes off the coast, looked back at this panorama of mountains and rocks and sea and thought: ‘This might be the best place I’ve ever, ever been.’”
It’s quite a compliment for someone who believes his farm in the Lake District is the place he always wants to live. But something else caught his eye that day.
“These quiet, unheralded women were working out there with the eider ducks and I was curious. I remember thinking at the time: ‘I wonder if anyone else has written about this?’”
The challenge of finding a subject for his third book revived the memory. “I was probably a little bit dazed and confused after the first two books,” he concedes. “All sorts of weird things come out of success.” His second book, English Pastoral, won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and was – like his debut, The Shepherd’s Life, translated into more than a dozen languages.
With his family’s blessing, he returned to spend the duck season with Anna and Ingrid. Anna comes from a long line of men and women who have done this work, stretching all the way back to a great, great grandfather in 1852. Nowadays, though, the tradition is teetering on the edge of extinction.
“I went there to get away from my worries about the future, but it was there. The sea is broken [by overfishing that has decimated the local fishing industry]. The people are getting old…”
From his trip to Norway he has brought back a variety of things. “It was the first time I had spent time in a place dominated by women, with women’s rules. I had to really think about that, embarrassingly, for the first time in my life.”
And on the farm? “I came back determined to mend home as Anna was determined to mend her island and its ecosystem. On the farm, we had been doing our bit, but we have definitely gone up a gear.”
He believes they are doing “the best farming we have ever done. We might now be one of the most progressive farms in Britain on transforming our soil. We have 15 worms per spade-full, when our neighbours have four. We need more worms in the soil.”
Not, he adds, that the day-to-day headaches of hill-farming ever go away.
“One of the biggest problems for anyone who farms around here is dogs off-lead that attack sheep. If we walk up the fell now where my sheep are, I can guarantee that there will be at least three people walking with their dogs off-lead, despite the signs telling them not to. They have an amazing sense of entitlement.”
What does he do when he catches them? “I give them a stern telling off. My dad would have said their dogs should be shot.”
Another medium-term cloud on the horizon is one that hovers over many family farms – succession. How will he sort it out with four children?
He shakes his head. “I haven’t got a clue what the perfect succession looks like when the capital value of land is wildly higher than its agricultural value because it is a tax dodge for corporates and pension funds.”
I can’t help thinking that whatever his reservations, accepting a seat round the Defra table would enable this articulate and thoughtful man at least a chance to impact on government policy in such matters. But then he has been burnt once already. In 2018 he resigned shortly after joining a Defra panel set up by then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, after environmentalists complained it had too many farmers on it.
Isn’t he actually both – farmer and environmentalist? “Yes,” he replies with a laugh. “And I need to show that there is a place for farmers like me in the environment of the future, and that we can deliver multiple things from the same piece of land.”
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks is published by Allen Lane on October 17 at £22.
